Ed Ruscha’s Gal Chews Gum is a brilliant synthesis of many aspects of his work, namely text, signage, and shadows, brought to life with the ancient technique of lost-wax bronze casting. Boldly declaring “GAL CHEWS SAME PIECE OF GUM SINCE 1970,” the bronze sculpture conjures up images of weathered road signs or billboards but conveys its message with negative space rather than flashing lights or bold graphics. Ruscha’s ongoing fascination with the phrase is evidenced by his use of it in previous works including paintings from 2008 and 2014, works on paper in 2016 and 2017, and a gravure print in 2019. Exploring it in sculpture, however, provided him with an additional outlet to explore the words creatively. As noted by Lapis Press, the viewer’s “three-dimensional experience with the text varies depending on placement of the sculpture… As the light source or vantage point changes, the phrase is legible or obscured as the cut-out words are filled and activated by whatever exists behind them.”
In this video from Lapis Press, we are provided a behind-the-scenes peek into the complex process behind making this iconic edition.
I’m interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn’t deserve being glorified. Something that’s forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object.
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha b. 1937
Ed Ruscha is known for his detached, cool gaze over the American landscape, its vernacular and built environments. He is a leading voice in contemporary art, consistently subverting the aesthetic and conceptual conventions of photography and painting, as well as the mythic narratives surrounding American culture.
Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937 and grew up in Oklahoma City. He moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend what is now the California Institute of the Arts. Upon graduating in 1960, Ruscha began working in commercial advertising, putting him in contact with relationships between image and text and the language of consumerism and popular culture. Ruscha’s early drawings and paintings bucked against the prevailing trend of abstract expressionism, depicting wry, irreverent takes on the banality of the urban landscape. In 1962, Ruscha was included in New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, a show considered the first museum exhibition of Pop Art that included works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Wayne Thiebaud.
In 1963, the year Ruscha’s now-famous artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations was published, he received his first solo show at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Ruscha made sixteen artist books in the 1960s and 1970s, most of them comprised of photography taken in an antagonistically plain, documentary style, covering subjects such as swimming pools, parking lots and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). In his photography and painting, Ruscha does not attempt to idealize his subjects, but rather stares deadpan at the ordinary objects and spaces that exist on the periphery of the experience of our surroundings. Ruscha is also celebrated for his approach to language, which is often amusing, incongruous and common, exploring the multiplicity of words and turning them into solid objects to be contemplated and played with.
Ruscha’s first major retrospective was in 1982 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The cover of the catalog featured a drawing he had made in 1979, with the text: “I don’t want no retro spective.” Ruscha continues to reside in his adopted city of Los Angeles, actively creating work that speaks to our rapidly changing contemporary landscape, the way we use language and our conception of the American ethos.
Auction Results Ed Ruscha
